Mike wants us to go to the Gifford Park, just those few miles from Birle. A coincidence? A coincidence on top of another coincidence, known only to me. There’ll have to be some first time, anyway, when Mike and I see Grannie Helen, knowing that, now, you know. There’ll have to be a first time for you. And when that time comes for me I’ll have to look at her, knowing that you know, but thinking also that she might have guessed all along. Are you with me? And what kind of double-double dissimulation and treading on eggs is that going to entail? I could do without that, too, next weekend.
Perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps it’s all just the stress of this situation and all in my overstretched imagination. It’s dawn, one week after your sixteenth birthday. It’s raining, it’s teeming. Some little bedraggled bird I can’t identify, which no doubt has a nest somewhere which is getting drenched too, is singing its heart out. Perhaps I’m wrong, but sometimes mothers can just tell things. In any case, they only want the best for their children.